Knowlagent, an intraday management solution provider for the world's 10 million call center agents, and Datapoint, a specialist in enterprise and call center communications infrastructure and applications, have partnered to assist European-based contact centers in eliminating agent idle time to help improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction.

This partnership allows Datapoint to promote and market Knowlagent's intraday management solution, RightTime, in conjunction with its own contact center optimization solution set.

Contact center agents inevitably have down time—about two to three minutes on average—in between calls. But when added up throughout the day, research shows that agents can spend 11 percent, or 49 minutes, of their day idle, simply waiting for a call. Knowlagent's RightTime works with automatic call distributors and workforce management solutions to aggregate wait time intervals into larger blocks of time, which frees up a smaller group of agents to complete off-phone work, including training, coaching, and after-call work.

"While an agent's primary function is to assist customers in resolving issues, they also need time for training, coaching, and education to ensure they deliver exceptional customer service," said Matt McConnell, president and CEO of Knowlagent, in a statement. "This partnership eliminates the struggle many managers face of finding time for agent training while maintaining service levels. By taking the best of what Datapoint has to offer and combining it with RightTime, we're able to deliver higher value to the contact center and the business."

"Contact center managers are always looking for ways to improve efficiencies, drive down costs, and yet maintain service levels. We believe that Knowlagent and Datapoint are offering managers a solution that does just that," said Jim Close, U.K. managing director at Datapoint, in the statement. "Our primary goal is to help our customers increase customer satisfaction and revenues while motivating employees. We will continue to work towards that through product innovation and partnerships such as this one with Knowlagent."